SOURCE: Taylor, Mark. “Henry IV and Proleptic Mimesis.” In Shakespeare's Imitations, pp. 66-106. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002.

[In the following essay, Taylor considers Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 within the context of the entire second tetralogy (which includes Richard II and Henry V), detailing how key scenes thematically imitate, echo, and foreshadow other episodes within the epic drama. He also calls attention to correspondences between the second tetralogy and the epic poems of Homer and Virgil.]

The primary subject of this chapter is two scenes from the first part of Henry IV: act 2, scene 4, in the Eastcheap tavern, where Prince Hal and Falstaff dramatically anticipate the prince's interview with King Henry the following day, and act 3, scene 2, at court, the interview itself, fateful, long-awaited, between the estranged father and son. My concern will be with each of the scenes as both a foreshadowing and an imitation after the fact of the other; that 2.4 may foreshadow 3.2 and that 3.2 may imitate 2.4 is obvious, but since 2.4 becomes essentially different after one has read 3.2, the corollary is true, also: that the later scene foreshadows the earlier one, and the earlier one imitates the later. I regard as axiomatic Harry Berger's claim that “the later terms [that is, elements of whatever sort within Shakespeare's second tetralogy of history plays] are radically modified by their relation to the earlier terms, which are in turn modified by that modification.”¹ The meaning of lines, speeches, characters, scenes is never fixed, not even for the theatergoer, whose memory of earlier speeches is inevitably triggered by later ones, which revise them, and especially for the reader, who pages backwards as well as forwards, who looks from bottom to top of page, who pauses, reflects, and then rereads; later moments always condition and reconfigure earlier ones.

It is impossible, however, to compare two scenes meaningfully and ignore the play in which they occur; and in the case of two scenes in 1 Henry IV, it is necessary to pay some attention not only to that play but to at least parts of the three others that with it constitute Shakespeare's major tetralogy of history plays. As Harry Berger writes, again, “To disconnect any play [of the four] from its tetralogical source is to impoverish the power of its drama and the resonance of its language.”² In very broad terms, therefore, we should bear in mind, as Prince Hal looks forward in 2.4 to his talk with the king, that that king was once the powerless Duke of Hereford being examined by his king (Richard II, 1.1), for one example, and that as the father Henry judges the son Hal in 3.2, so will Hal come to judge his surrogate father Falstaff (in 2 Henry IV, 5.5) and Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey (in Henry V, 2.2), for another. In practice, of course, one can never pay sufficient attention to the complete environment, no less than every word in the tetralogy in every conceivable combination with every other word, of any given element, but must be content with what appears most pertinent—while being aware of the inherent subjectivity of this procedure. Specifically, a review of Richard II seen from the perspective of 1 Henry IV can suggest that the dramatic interludes created by Hal and Falstaff in 2.4 of the latter play are forecast by the first crisis of the new king's reign in the former. And since the Falstaff-Hal interludes of 2.4 are in some ways an unheroic version of the heroic encounter of father and son two scenes later, it will be illuminating to consider other parts of 1 Henry IV in relations to their heroic antecedents.

THE BEGGAR AND THE KING

Henry Bolingbroke's seizure of Richard's throne in Richard II is often understood as symbolically signaling the transition from the medieval to the modern age, from a moment when kings claimed to rule by divine authority alone and perhaps really believed, as Richard says, that “The breath of wordly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord” (3.2.56-57), to one when kings would rule by their own authority and could no longer bring their subjects into line with threats of divine reprisals—when Richard tries, after his deposition, so to threaten Northumberland, Northumberland replies, “My guilt be on my head, and there an end” (5.1.69).³ Symbolic values apart, the act of usurpation is clearly beneficial for Henry himself, who gets what he wants as he goes from not being a king to being one, from what virtually every character in Shakespeare who has a thought on the matter would agree is from a less to a more desirable state. But apart from historical transformations and what is good for Henry, his usurpation implicitly addresses and seeks to correct excesses and deficiencies of Richard's rule.

Henry's revolution seeks, or should seek, political and social reform. Although in the deposition scene of act 4, scene 1, Northumberland never succeeds in making Richard read the list of “These accusations and these grievous crimes / Committed by your person and your followers / Against the state and profit of this land” (4.1.223-25), the nature of “these grievous crimes” is constantly reiterated throughout the play. Richard himself admits that “our coffers, with too great a court / And liberal largess, are grown somewhat light,” in consequence of which extravagance, “We are inforc'd to farm our royal realm” (1.4.43-45), an expedient that has left England, John of Gaunt will say, famously, “leas'd out … / Like to a tenement or pelting farm” (2.1.59-60). The need for funds, especially to finance his Irish campaign, drives Richard to exchange for the equivalent of ready cash the authority to tax royal lands, for short-term liquidity the certainty of long-term ruin. When Northumberland, Willoughby, and Ross start whispering to each other their dissatisfactions with Richard, they mention “grievous taxes,” fines imposed upon the nobility for “ancient quarrels,” and “daily new exactions … [such] As blanks, benevolences,” twin forms of extortion, and allege that “The King's grown bankrupt,” that “Reproach and dissolution hangeth over him” (2.1.246, 248, 249-50, 257, 258). They charge, moreover, that “The King is not himself, but basely led / By flatterers” (241-42), and a scene later three of these flatterers, Bushy, Green, and Bagot, essentially agree in their responsibility for the English fiscal crisis. “[O]ur nearness to the King in love / Is near the hate of those love not the King,” Green says, and Bagot replies, “And that's the wavering commons, for their love / Lies in their purses, and whoso empties them / By so much fills their hearts with deadly hate” (2.2.126-30). And a scene later still, justifying his return to England to the Duke of York—“If that my cousin king be King in England, / It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster” (2.3.122-23)—Henry offers the parallel example of York's son, Aumerle, and says that if Aumerle had “been thus trod down” (125) by Richard, as Henry has been, then he would have found a champion in Gaunt, Henry's father, as Henry now seeks one in York, Aumerle's father. Henry's point is that Richard's actions have been unjust and would have been so no matter against whom they were directed.

If Henry's acquisition of Richard's throne is to mean anything to the English nobility and commons other than the substitution of one selfish and unprincipled authority for another, it must stand for a correction of wrongs—for an end to unsound fiscal policies, arbitrary taxation, perilous foreign adventurism, and the deliberate seeking of poor advice from poor advisers. It must stand for some reasonable idea of justice. W. H. Auden tells us that, “According to Shakespeare, the ideal Ruler must satisfy five conditions” including these: “1) He must know what is just and what is unjust. 2) He must himself be just. [and] 3) He must be strong enough to compel those who would like to be unjust to behave justly.”⁴ For Auden, Richard fails to satisfy these conditions (though he satisfies the fifth one of being “the legitimate ruler by whatever standard legitimacy is determined in the society to which he belongs”),⁵ but “Bolingbroke possesses many of the right qualities.”⁶ In the very short run—that is, for the rest of Richard II—such may appear to be the case; but even in this play, with his final statement of his intended “voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood from off my guilty hand” (5.6.49-50), Henry raises the specter of costly involvement in foreign affairs pursued for personal interests, cleansing of his own sins. Two plays later, when the dying Henry IV counsels his son “to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” (2 Henry IV, 4.5.213-14), we read the quality of this advice back into the words spoken at the end of Richard II and infer that all along Henry's purpose, or at least a large part of it, has been a strategy of diversion, of distracting his nobles from other possibilities, not of personal salvation. Richard's Ireland, Henry IV's Holy Land (which, of course, he never reaches), Henry V's France: these missions are or would be expensive, in money and in lives. The most evidently successful of them, Henry V's campaign in France, which at least historically promises the French throne to him or his heir upon the death of Charles VI,⁷ a concession by the French to what Henry calls “our just demands” (5.2.71), might also be seen as the cheapest of them, since eventually paid for by the French; however, the political basis of the war, the Salic law that justified Henry's claim to the French throne, is advanced and argued by the Archbishop of Canterbury (1.2.33-95), whose own goal is the preservation of the Church's wealth, “the better half of our possession … As much as would maintain, to the King's honour, / Full fifteen earls and fifteen hundred knights, / Six thousand and two hundred good esquires, / And to relief of lazars and weak age, / Of indigent faint souls past corporal toil, / A hundred almshouses right well supplied” (1.1.8, 12-17). “Would maintain”: the Church is in fact not using its fortune for such maintenance, it appears, not even of the diseased, weak, and indigent, and so ultimately even Henry's “just” war, like Richard's obviously ruinous one, which it morally imitates, is a way of keeping the poor that way.

In Richard II both Richard and Henry are known in part through their closest associates and advisers, Bushy, Bagot, and Green, on the one hand, Ross, Willoughby, and especially Northumberland, on the other. Richard dies, and Henry prospers, and surely one reason is the quality, whether or not selfless, of the men about them. Or, once again, so it at first seems. Northumberland, Henry's hatchet man in Richard II, does the necessary but sometimes unpopular things like arresting Carlisle for “capital treason” (4.1.151), presenting Richard with the articles of his grievous crimes (4.1.223 et seq), and separating the deposed king from his queen (5.1.51-54). But in this play Richard's advisers, however feckless, prove loyal to the end, and brave—“More welcome is the stroke of death to me / Than Bolingbroke to England” (3.1.30-31), Bushy says to Henry, his last words. In the next play, Northumberland shows by his rebellion how little loyal he is to his king or to the high-minded principles he had enunciated in Richard II, his desire to “shake off our slavish yoke, / Imp our drooping country's broken wing / Redeem from broking pawn the blemish'd crown, / Wipe off the dust that hides our sceptre's gilt, / And make high majesty look like itself” (2.1.291-95); “most degenerate king!” Northumberland calls Richard in Richard II (2.1.262), and then listens with a straight face, in 1 Henry IV, as Hotspur calls this same man “Richard, that sweet lovely rose” (1.3.175). Nothing drives Northumberland but self-interest, which later will compel the withdrawal of his forces from the rebellion that culminates in the battle at Shrewsbury, because of illness (“he is grievous sick” [4.1.16]), he pretends at the time, a claim that Rumor, in 2 Henry IV gives the lie, labeling him but “crafty-sick” (Induction 37), or playing possum. The dignity with which Bushy and Green faced death looks better and better, more and more rare.

“How many ages hence,” Cassius will ask, after the assassination of Caesar, “Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” (Julius Caesar, 3.1.111-13). Richard dies and one Henry rules and then another; the court party of Bushy and Green passes from the scene, replaced by Northumberland, himself later replaced by Blunt and Westmorland, then Warwick and Surrey, then Gloucester, Bedford, and Exeter; part of the attention of the English monarch shifts from Ireland to the Holy Land and then to France; part of it focuses on ill-wishers at home, Bolingbroke and Northumberland, then Hotspur and Worcester, then Mowbray and Hastings, then Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey. The only representatives of common men in Richard II, the gardener and his man, grumble about the condition of the kingdom, “our sea-walled garden, the whole land, / … full of weeds, her fairest flowers chok'd up …” (3.4.43-44), and the most memorable representative of the same estate in Henry V, Ancient Pistol, inherits only a future of deception and crime: “To England will I steal, and there I'll steal; / And patches will I get unto these cudgelled scars, / And swear I got them in the Gallia wars” (5.1.86-88); between these men and these plays Falstaff is born, lives, and dies. Characters, incidents, and motives within the tetralogy recur in different dress, imitate versions of their earlier selves. Does anything really change? Or is each lofty scene a repetition, with different names and local coloration, of an earlier one, simply an acting over?

(Shakespearean imitation sometimes allows a later, ironical illustration of an earlier, seemingly high-minded principle. Apparently, Pistol's plan is to put patches on his “cudgelled scars,” that is, to put plasters or bandages on marks presumably created in street brawls, the cudgel not being a usual weapon of war, to claim the injuries are war wounds, and thereby to gain sympathy, and compensation, as a beggar. Earlier, in his Saint Crispin's Day speech, King Henry had told Westmorland that in years to come a veteran of the great battle about to be fought might “strip his sleeve and show his scars, / And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin's day’” [4.3.47-48]. Such is exactly what Pistol will be doing.)

Richard II begins with an insurrection against Richard and ends, almost, with another insurrection, that of Aumerle and his confreres against Henry, their abortive attempt “To kill the King at Oxford” (5.2.99). Although Henry's rebellion in a sense authorizes that of Aumerle (and in the next play that of Hotspur, Northumberland, and Worcester), both because his initiative automatically begets imitators and because he has slain the last king to enjoy, theoretically, the sanction of God, thus making subsequent revolts less risky, the second rebellion does not repeat, and basically does not resemble, the first. The story of Aumerle, born in the final speeches of act 4, where he asks the Abbot of Westminster, “[I]s there no plot / To rid the realm of this pernicious blot?” (4.1.324-25), is told mainly in scenes 2 and 3 of act 5, and that story is a kind of literary imitation of the play's main action—literary, fictional, unrealistic, parodic. If the main plot of Richard II is an imitation, serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, of an action that occurred (1398-1400) about two centuries before Shakespeare wrote his play (c. 1595), an imitation that usually does not seek to call attention to its fictional status, then the Aumerle plot is an imitation, complete, problematically serious, of small magnitude, of that main plot, and it presents itself as such. The second scene of act 5 begins with the Duke of York telling his duchess of the public humiliations of Richard, “dust and rubbish” thrown on his head (6), as “with much … contempt, men's eyes / Did scowl on Richard” (27-28), and the corresponding triumph of Henry, “Upon [whose] visage” “young and old / Through casements darted their desiring eyes” (15, 13-14). The duke and duchess emphasize that the story is a story, his narrative of events he witnessed. “My lord,” the duchess says, “you told me you would tell the rest” of “the story” (1-2) that he had begun earlier and broken off because of his own sorrow, and he asks, “Where did I leave?” (4). Telling the story, York presents Richard in an elaborate theatrical simile: “As in a theatre the eyes of men, / After a well-grac'd actor leaves the stage, / Are idly bent on him that enters next, / Thinking his prattle to be tedious; / Even so, or with much more contempt, men's eyes / Did scowl on Richard” (23-28). The effect of the simile, contrary to York's intention, is to distance and objectify Richard, to remove him from the environment of York and his wife, and thus, if they are real, to make him fictional.

York's narrative is interrupted by the entrance of Aumerle, “my son, Aumerle” (41), the duchess says, not “our son,” interestingly, for in what follows, York will scarcely regard Aumerle as his son. After a few lines of small talk York discovers upon Aumerle's person a letter detailing the conspiracy against Richard. “What seal is that that hangs without thy bosom?” York asks when he notices the letter (56). In using this device of discovery, Shakespeare is following his source in Holinshed's Chronicles:

[The] earle of Rutland [i.e., Aumerle, who in both Holinshed and Shakespeare has lost his dukedom and therefore his title] … as he sat at dinner, had his counterpane of the confederacie in his bosome. The father espieng it, would needs see what it was: and though the sonne humblie denied to shew it, the father being more earnest to see it, by force tooke it out of his bosome; and perceiving the contents thereof, in a great rage … he incontinentlie mounted on horssebacke to ride towards Windsore to the king, to declare unto him the malicious intent of his complices.⁸

Holinshed shows no suspicion of Aumerle's clumsiness in allowing the letter to protrude from his bosom, but ten years later Shakespeare will interrogate Aumerle's purposes, when in King Lear Edmund arranges to have his father espy a letter he is concealing on his person (1.2.26ff.). No other source for Edmund's practice on Gloucester has been identified—“For the story of Gloucester and his sons, Shakespeare borrowed an episode from Sidney's Arcadia,” but nothing in that episode prepares for act 1, scene 2 of the play⁹—and although one is properly wary of trying to read Shakespeare's mind, it is tempting to suspect that he came to doubt, or doubted all along, that York's discovery of the letter was contrary to Aumerle's real purposes, conscious or otherwise. Denying the obvious—that is, the concrete fact of the letter—Aumerle and Edmund use almost the same language: to York's demand to “see the writing,” Aumerle replies, “My lord, 'tis nothing” (57-58), and to his father's question, “What paper were you reading?” Edmund responds, “Nothing, my lord” (31-32).¹⁰ Whatever the degree of Aumerle's original commitment to the conspiracy against Henry, he will use the letter as an occasion to assure Henry that, “I do repent me, read not my name there; / My heart is not confederate with my hand” (5.3.50-51), to ingratiate himself with the new king, to demonstrate his loyalty to him, much as Edmund uses the other letter to ingratiate himself with Gloucester, while pretending loyalty to Edgar. Aumerle tested the waters of the conspiracy, found them not to his liking, and sought comfort in his new monarch, never mind that those who had risen to his proposal “To rid the realm of this pernicious blot” are left with “Destruction … [to] dog them at the heels” (5.3.137).

In Holinshed, after discovering the letter, the Duke of York rides “towards Windsore to the king,” but Aumerle gets there first and has already received Henry's pardon when his father arrives; the king then turns his attention to the other conspirators, who are at Oxford. This business occupies three sentences of the Chronicles.¹¹ Shakespeare, with not even a suggestion from any of his sources (Holinshed, Hall, Samuel Daniel, possibly The Mirror for Magistrates), magnifies this brief incident into the grand comic sequence of the play in which York denounces Aumerle, the duchess defends him, and York attacks her, this “foolish woman,” “Thou fond mad woman” (5.2.80, 95). Then the three head off to Windsor Castle, where King Henry and Harry Percy, the Hotspur of the next play, are discussing the delinquencies of the king's “unthrifty son” (5.3.1), Prince Hal; the difficulties between this father and son thus provide an environment in which the struggle between the father York and the son Aumerle will be presented. This struggle erupts in earnest, as Aumerle arrives first to plead for “pardon ere I rise or speak” (5.3.31); then York arrives and from offstage, that is, not yet admitted to the king's presence, warns Henry that “Thou has a traitor in thy presence there” (39) and then, admitted, pleads for the death of his son, “Mine honour lives when his dishonour dies” (69); and then the duchess, a “shrill-voic'd suppliant” (73), arrives and, even before she enters the room to plead for the life of her son, prompts Henry's acute diagnosis of the occasion: “Our scene is alter'd from a serious thing, / And now changed to ‘The Beggar and the King’” (78-79). Henry mediates among the three: Aumerle, desperate to save his own life; York, desperate for a return to a stable monarchy, for an end to rebellions and attempted coups d'état, even if the price is the death of his son; and the duchess, desperate to save her son, “my transgressing boy” (95), with no interest in larger political considerations. Aumerle and his mother prevail.

Henry's perception that “Our scene is alter'd from a serious thing, / And now changed to” a reprise of the old ballad of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid has implications that are both larger and less entirely farcical than may at first be apparent. “Our scene,” to begin with, is not only the immediate engagement with Aumerle over the plot against the new king, it is also the action of the play since its beginning, in the sense that Cassius's “lofty scene” can include his and Brutus's ambition and the inadequacies of Caesar as well as the assassination. The alteration of this scene, therefore, is a breaking of the cycle of rebellions and bloodshed by the intercession of the duchess on behalf of Aumerle. Richard II is a play where, as is often remarked, women are even more powerless than their small numbers, few scenes, and few lines might suggest: to the Duchess of Gloucester's question, “Where then, alas, may I complain myself?” about the death of her husband, her brother-in-law John of Gaunt replies, “To God, the widow's champion and defense” (1.2.42-43), and to the queen's request that Richard be sent into banishment with her, Northumberland replies, “That were some love, but little policy” (5.1.84). As a matter of fact, that scene between the Duchess of Gloucester and John of Gaunt is a foil to 5.3 and sets off the unexpected capability of the Duchess of York. In both scenes a woman is responding to the accomplished or threatened killing of a husband or a son, and in both, referring to the bearing or rearing functions of the female, the woman adopts a lexicon appropriate to a woman. Speaking of the mother of her late husband and also of Gaunt, the Duchess of Gloucester says, “that bed, that womb, / That mettle, that self mould that fashioned thee / Made him a man; and though thou livest and breathest, / Yet art thou slain in him” (1.2.22-24), and the Duchess of York says to King Henry, “And if I were thy nurse, thy tongue to teach, / ‘Pardon’ should be the first word of thy speech” (5.3.111-12).¹² But whereas there can be no relief, restitution, or satisfaction for the Duchess of York, who may pray “To God, the widow's champion” but does not get so much as an audience with King Richard, the Duchess of York has no difficulty finding admission to Henry's court, addressing him, being listened to and heeded: “Good aunt, stand up …,” Henry says. “I pardon him, as God shall pardon me” (5.3.127, 129). This concession is a step toward reconciliation and also an interruption, not for long as it turns out, of the cycle of rebellion. Thus, “The Beggar and the King” allows the end of Richard II not to imitate its beginning.

EPIC IMITATION

Shakespeare's major historical tetralogy is commonly called his Henriad because, as Alvin Kernan explains, the four plays from Richard II through Henry V “constitute an epic … not … in the usual sense” but because “they do have remarkable coherence and they possess that quality which in our time we take to be the chief characteristic of epic: a large-scale heroic action, involving many men and many activities, tracing the movement of a nation or people through violent change from one condition to another.”¹³ Thus, the collective title, the Henriad, the story of Henry (the story, actually, of two Henrys), imitates the titles of the Iliad and the Aeneid, the stories of Ilium and Aeneas. Shakespeare's imitation of these two ancient epics is, however, both deeper than mere titles and more precise than Kernan's broad outlines suggest. Individual incidents in the plays strikingly recall, imitate, and revise incidents in the poems of Homer and Virgil. My concern here is with 1 Henry IV; before I discuss its internal imitations of itself, however, I wish to inspect in three episodes some of the play's revisions of the two ancient poems: in “The King hath many marching in his coats,” what I shall call the imitation of Patroclus (Iliad 16); in Hal's offer to “Try fortune with [Hotspur] in a single fight,” the imitation of Turnus (Aeneid 12); and in Hal's “breaking through the foul and ugly mists / Of vapors that did seem to strangle him,” the imitation of Aeneas (Aeneid 1).

No one doubts Shakespeare's thorough knowledge of the Aeneid, hugely and obviously important to Hamlet, The Tempest, and other plays, but the playwright's relation to the Iliad is trickier, especially the relation of all but the last plays to the later books of the poem. Ben Jonson's famously limiting statement of Shakespeare's abilities in the classical languages, “And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,” could suggest that Homer would have been beyond Shakespeare's grasp. Arthur Hall published his translation of the first ten books of the Iliad in 1581, and George Chapman, his translation of books 1, 2, and 7-11 in 1598 (about a year or two, probably, after 1 Henry IV was written), of the first twelve books in 1609, and of the whole poem, its first complete Englishing, in 1611.¹⁴ Nevertheless, Shakespeare certainly knew people who knew Greek well, and Latin and French translations of Homer existed; the figure whom Dante three centuries earlier had called “l'altissimo poeta” (Inferno 4, 80) and “poeta sovrano” (4, 88) was simply available to anyone who cared, and one way or another, as Reuben Brower points out, Shakespeare, “hardly a reader without literary curiosity … acquired … knowledge of Homer.”¹⁵

But Shakespeare's knowledge of earlier poets and poems, his sources, his reading, his ease with classical languages, is really not the point. The great moments in Homer and Virgil with which I am concerned here possess a strange kind of hold on the imagination that makes them resonate beyond particular literary instances, even the first such instances. One man fighting in the armor of another, being mistaken for him, and consequently losing his life strikes one as a tragic part of war, inevitable and permanent whether or not it is enshrined, for the first time or not, in Homer. In all battles identities are easily mistaken, purposes are repeatedly frustrated, and, deliberately or not, men surrender their lives for others: these circumstances converge in one man posing as another, being taken for him, dying for him, and then, his real identity discovered, disappointing or symbolically eluding his vanquisher. If, in his creation of the three episodes that here concern me, Shakespeare may be said to be an “imitator,” that word should not suggest that he is copying the ancients but rather that he is among those who, as Sir Philip Sidney describes them, “most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be, but range only reined with learned discretion into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.”¹⁶ The timelessness of a certain action on a battlefield makes it appropriate to representation as what may be and should be. So in a sense the point is that Shakespeare, Homer, and Virgil all give literary embodiment to some archetypes of human experience and imagination.

At the same time, however, I do think that an auditor with a passing acquaintance with the classics would have perceived three episodes in 1 Henry IV as deliberate variations on materials from the classics. The perception that Shakespeare is doing what Homer or Virgil has also done would prompt a contrast of the two achievements, a measuring of one by the other, an evaluation of the new (Shakespeare) according to an understanding of the old (Homer or Virgil).

The word Henriad, I have said, is formed by analogy with the titles of traditional epic poems, especially the Aeneid: the stories of Henry (father and especially son, King Henry IV and King Henry V) somehow imitate, in scope and grandeur, sincerely or ironically, the story of Aeneas. Epic poems are called also heroic poems because, first, they are told in heroic meter (so called since the Middle Ages)—in English this meter will be iambic pentameter (Milton describes the “measure” of Paradise Lost as “English Heroic Verse without Rime” and claims as antecedent to his practice “our best English Tragedies”)¹⁷—and second, because at their center is a hero, a man set apart from others by his excellences, whether practical, moral, intellectual, or aesthetic, or some combination of these. Describing the young King Henry V, apparently transformed by and after his father's death, the archbishop of Canterbury nicely abstracts the hero:

Consideration like an angel came
And whipped th'offending Adam out of him,
Leaving his body as a paradise
T'envelop and contain celestial spirits.

(Henry V, 1.1.28-31)

This section, on Epic Imitation, will implicitly compare the Henriad with the Iliad and the Aeneid, but it will explicitly compare Shakespeare's heroes, King Henry IV and Prince Hal, with some heroes of Homer and Virgil, with Patroclus, Turnus, and Aeneas himself. The comparisons will reveal Shakespeare's Henrys as bruised and diminished versions of their classical prototypes and cast some doubt on the authenticity of “celestial spirits” within them.

1. THE IMITATION OF PATROCLUS

After scenes of futile negotiations between Hotspur and Blunt (4.3) and the king and Worcester (5.1), and then a scene of hurried preparations among Hotspur, Worcester, and Vernon, the battle on the field at Shrewsbury commences in earnest in the third scene of act 5. Its first action is a confrontation between the rebellious Scottish chieftain Douglas and Sir Walter Blunt, not merely of the king's party but in the battle costume of the king, that is, wearing over his armor a vest, or “sleeveless surcoat,” embroidered with the King's coat of arms.¹⁸ In response to Blunt's questions, Douglas reveals his own name and claims to “haunt thee in the battle thus / Because some tell me that thou art a king” (5.3.4-5). “They tell thee true,” Blunt says (6), and after reproving the man he believes to be King Henry for having allowed the “Lord of Stafford” to fight and die as “Thy likeness” (7, 8), Douglas kills Blunt, this second likeness of the king. Douglas is momentarily triumphant: “All's done: all's won; here breathless lies the King” (16), he tells Hotspur, who has just entered. Hotspur, because he knows what the king looks like, as Douglas does not, or because he removes the dead man's helmet and looks at his face, shatters Douglas's sense of triumph: “This, Douglas? No, I know this face full well, / A gallant knight he was, his name was Blunt, / Semblably furnish'd like the King himself” (19-21).¹⁹ The brave Douglas seems unable to understand why Blunt would have sacrificed himself so: “A fool go with thy soul, whither it goes! / A borrow'd title hast thou bought too dear. / Why didst thou tell me that thou wert a king?”—perhaps implying that his determination to kill his opponent would have been less had he known his real identity. Hotspur has the last word on the subject, “The King hath many marching in his coats” (22-25), in this scene. But ironically, in the next scene, when finally Douglas confronts the real king, he will say, “Another king! They grow like Hydra's heads” and ask, “What art thou / That counterfeit'st the person of a king?” (5.4.24, 26-27).

In book 16 of the Iliad, the Trojans having driven the Achaeans back to their ships, which they now threaten with fire, as Achilles, because of his anger at Agamemnon, continues his refusal to fight, Patroclus proposes to Achilles a stratagem whereby “‘perhaps I may bring deliverance to the Danaans. Let me … wear your armour [into battle]; the Trojans may thus mistake me for you and quit the field, so that the hard-pressed sons of the Achaeans may have breathing time. … We who are fresh might soon drive tired men back from our ships and tents to their own cities.’”²⁰ In what Cedric Whitman calls “the most puzzling part of Achilles' actions” because “Even those who forgive Achilles his rejection of the embassy [of Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix, in book 9] find it difficult to forgive him for letting Patroclus take his place on the battlefield,”²¹ Achilles agrees because he sees that Patroclus's effort will contribute to his own glory. “‘Do, however, as I now bid you,’” Achilles tells his friend, “‘that you may win me great honour from all the Danaans, and that they may restore the girl [Briseis] to me again and give me rich gifts into the bargain.’” However, he does restrict Patroclus's mission: “‘[D]o not for lust of battle [after driving the Trojans back from the ships] go on killing the Trojans nor lead the Achaeans on to Ilium, lest one of the ever-living gods from Olympus attack you—for Phoebus Apollo loves them well. …’” (242). Patroclus leads the Myrmidons against the Trojans, and his initial success is stunning: “when the Trojans saw the brave son of Menoetius [i.e., Patroclus, though the Trojans mistake him for Achilles] and his squire all gleaming in their armour, they were daunted and their battalions were thrown into confusion, for they thought the fleet son of Peleus must now have put aside his anger. …” (246). Indeed, in playing Achilles, in Cedric Whitman's view, Patroclus “transcends himself” and embodies a part of Achilles.²² This self-transcendence leads Patroclus to forget himself and the limitations of his strength and his mission; after killing many Trojans, most notably Sarpedon among them, Patroclus pursues his enemy back to the gates of the city. He is driven, Homer tells us, by “the pride and foolishness of his heart,” and fatally so: “Had he but obeyed the bidding of the son of Peleus, he would have escaped death” (255). As it is, Patroclus angers Apollo, who dispatches Hector into the fray; then Apollo himself, “enshrouded in thick darkness … struck [Patroclus] from behind” and “beat the helmet from off his head” (259). His real identity now known to the Trojans, Patroclus is wounded by the Trojan Euphorbus and then killed by Hector, who “struck him in the lower part of the belly with a spear, driving the bronze point right through it. …” (259). Hector will then take his—that is, really, Achilles's—armor and wear it until his own death. Medēn agan, the oracle of Apollo at Delphi would caution, “Nothing in excess.” Patroclus's advance to the gates of Troy is the excess that destroys him.

Holinshed's Chronicles supplies Shakespeare with historical authority for the disguises King Henry's loyal followers assume. Holinshed puts Douglas's struggle with the king and the killing of Sir Walter Blunt, which Shakespeare will divide into separate scenes, into a single sentence:

This battell [at Shrewsbury] lasted three long houres, with indifferent fortune on both parts, till at length, the king crieng saint George victorie, brake the arraie of his enimies, and adventured so farre, that (as some write) the earle Dowglas strake him downe, & at that instant slue Sir Walter Blunt, and three other, apparelled in the kings sute and clothing, saieng: I marvell to see so many kings thus suddenlie arise one in the necke of an other.

Similarly marveling in Shakespeare's play, Douglas fights Henry, and although Douglas acknowledges that “thou bearest thee like a king” (5.4.35), after a few blows, “[… the King being in danger.] Re-enter PRINCE” (37 s.d.), who intervenes and saves his father's life. Not so in Holinshed: “The king in deed was raised, & did that daie manie a noble feat of armes, for as it is written, he slue that daie with his owne hands six and thirtie persons of his enemies.”²³ Holinshed's Henry, able to dispatch 36 of the enemy, is obviously a far more capable warrior than Shakespeare's, who kills no one at Shrewsbury and requires the intercession of Prince Hal to preserve his own life. Indeed, the failure of Shakespeare's Henry to kill anyone, in the battle for the preservation of his throne, appears to disclose the playwright's intent to diminish the luster of the figure in Holinshed.

More pertinent than a comparison of the two kings, however, is a comparison of Homer's Patroclus and Shakespeare's Blunt, though it will work in similar fashion to reduce the heroic potential of Shakespeare's war and that war's victors. Neither Holinshed nor Shakespeare gives any reason for Blunt and the others “marching in [the king's] coats,” though Shakespeare integrates that circumstance neatly into the motif of concealment, deception, and counterfeiting that Douglas reiterates when he accuses Henry of “counterfeit[ing] the person of a king.”²⁴ Whatever the reason may be, the disguise places Blunt in great jeopardy: mistaken for the king, he is more, not less, desirable as an opponent, at least to a brave man like Douglas, whose own proven worth increases in direct proportion to the worth of his foes. That is why he can tell Blunt's corpse, “A borrowed title hast thou bought too dear”: not appearing as the king, Blunt could have been ignored by his betters. Reflecting on warfare in the Middle Ages, John Keegan writes: “For killing to be gentlemanly,” on a medieval battlefield, “it must take place between gentlemen: the rules of duelling were, indeed, specific on that point, and the laws of chivalry, though less exigent and exclusive, were equally insistent that the only feats of arms worth the name were those conducted between men of gentle birth, either one to one or in nearly (ideally in exactly) matched numbers.”²⁵ The corollary of this observation, in 1 Henry IV, seems to be, as we know from Douglas's words to Blunt's corpse, that a Scottish earl can disdain to duel with an English knight. The notion that the king, and therefore people mistaken for the king, could have frightened warriors away, could have demoralized the enemy, is in this play a mistaken hypothesis, though it is precisely the basis of Patroclus's strength in book 16 of the Iliad. “As when a cloud goes up into heaven from Olympus, rising out of a clear sky when Zeus is brewing a gale—even with such panic-stricken rout did the Trojans now fly” (248) from Patroclus—but only because they think he is Achilles. Patroclus-as-Achilles confuses and terrifies the enemy; Blunt-as-Henry focuses and stimulates him.

Blunt's disguise, moreover, protects and preserves his king, and it is tempting to think that something like the desire for this protection was in Henry's mind when he sent into battle “many marching in his coats.” It is the wish of officers in modern armies not to stand out from their troops, not to be visible as officers to snipers, that keeps gold braid and saluting off the battlefield; something of the same end would be achieved if everyone dressed as a general—as Henry has his followers do. For Achilles, by contrast, the anger at Agamemnon that keeps him from battle is mistaken by no one for a reluctance to engage personally in combat. His allowing Patroclus (whose idea it is in the first place) to fight as he is a concession, he says, that “may win me great honour from all the Danaans.”

The Iliad and 1 Henry IV both consider the proposition that combat, even unto death, allows a man the possibility of self-actualization that he is otherwise denied. Fighting, he can be more fully himself, or a more desirable version of himself, than otherwise; this belief is the basis of the heroic ethic, or at least a substantial part of it. It is why cultures glorify warriors, why men who fight outrank men who work and men who pray. This ethic is universally acknowledged in the Iliad, notwithstanding the final subordination of personal achievement to all-leveling force;²⁶ in 1 Henry IV, where others may be aware of its existence and appeal, it is the private and public conviction of Hotspur. In the Iliad, therefore, though the heroic ethic may cause the death of Patroclus, it also creates a better man for Hector to kill; this is the moment of his transcending himself of which Cedric Whitman speaks. Indeed, it is probably part of the genius of Homer's poem that it can make us see the agon of Patroclus as simultaneously the terrible waste of “a loving and compassionate fellow,” “Gentle Patroclus,”²⁷ and the moment of his supreme being. Battle affords Sir Walter Blunt, Stafford, and the others who die for and as King Henry no such moment of rising above themselves. Henry's stratagem keeps him alive; it does nothing for anyone else except make them more quickly dead.

2. THE IMITATION OF TURNUS

So great is the waste of war—young lives ended, bodies mutilated, children left without fathers, wives widowed, mothers bereft of sons (“the widows' tears, the orphans' cries, / The dead men's blood, the pining maidens' groans,” Henry V, 2.4.106-7), women themselves victims of murder and rape (when “your pure maidens fall into the hand / Of hot and forcing violation,” Henry V, 3.3.20-21), the loss of homeland, crops despoiled, livestock slaughtered, wells poisoned, buildings turned to rubble, civilizations turned upside-down or destroyed—that it is hardly surprising that the human imagination should conceive of an alternative—of a way that the political goals of warfare may be achieved, for one side or the other, but without the loss and misery produced by fighting on a grand scale. Moreover, since the tangible purposes for which wars are fought—territory and other forms of material gain as opposed to honor and glory—are rarely appreciated by the great mass of men fighting, the soldiers, why not restrict fighting to those who will actually come to possess, or to lose, the disputed wealth? “War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale,” Clausewitz writes; it consists of “a countless number of duels.”²⁸ If that is so, then why not reduce the scale of war and have a single duel between people whose personal fortunes will be immediately and directly affected by the outcome, between two princes or other leaders with something to gain or lose?

This would be a philanthropic solution, one based on a desire to keep men alive. “Now,” Clausewitz writes, “philanthropists may easily imagine there is a skilful method of disarming and overcoming an enemy without causing great bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the Art of War. However plausible this may appear, it is still an error which must be gotten rid of; for in such dangerous things as War, the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst. As the use of physical power to the utmost extent by no means excludes the cooperation of the intelligence, it follows that he who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses less vigour in its application.”²⁹ To obtain a superiority, that is to win, one applies physical power to the utmost extent, one uses force unsparingly. This law of war obviously precludes anyone's desire to limit bloodshed or minimize the number of participants.

Nevertheless, the notion of solving international conflict by a duel, by one act of combat between two individuals, dangerously philanthropic or not, inevitably imposes itself on the imagination; and it is especially attractive in the creation of works of literature where the goals, desires, hopes, fears, strengths, weaknesses—all the facets of a human personality—of two men can be conveyed and those of all the members of two nations cannot, or not easily. A duel can both localize and dramatize the unmanageable numbers and abstractions that war comprises. Even where the duel does not solve the conflict, it represents it. So in popular war fiction like Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1948), for instance, the killing by an American soldier of a German soldier who has just killed another American soldier, the first one's buddy, all three of whom have been separately developed over hundreds of pages—that final killing personalizes and stands by synecdoche for the Allied victory over the Axis. The Achaeans win the Trojan War because they are willing to spend tens of thousands of their own lives killing tens of thousands of the enemy, leveling a civilization, securing the trade routes to Asia, and effecting the return of Helen to Menelaus. They do not win because Achilles kills Hector; if the ancient story is to be believed, Achilles is no longer alive at the war's end, and credit for the Achaean victory belongs to lesser heroes like Odysseus. Paradoxically, however, the Iliad says that the Achaeans will win the war precisely because Achilles does kill Hector. The Iliad does not take the war to its end, but it makes the nature of that end and the reason for it perfectly clear: the greatest of the Achaeans, Achilles, has defeated the greatest of the Trojans, Hector, and he has done so, as every reader somehow knows from the beginning will happen, must happen, should happen, in combat between the two men alone. It would not do for another man to kill Hector, or for him to fall to an unknown adversary. Despite its enormous cast of characters, its relentless fighting and shedding of blood, its concerns with the anger of Achilles, the arrogance of Agamemnon, the fears of Andromache, the sorrow of Priam, the Iliad is as much about the combat of Achilles and Hector as about any other single thing.

The historical Henry Percy, Shakespeare's Hotspur, died at the Battle of Shrewsbury, at whose hand we probably do not know. Holinshed tells us that “The other on his part incouraged by [King Henry's] doings, fought valiantlie, and slue the lord Persie, called sir Henry Hotspurre,” where it is possible but by no means certain that the “other” refers to Prince Hal, who was mentioned about two hundred words earlier; it is more likely that “other” means simply another soldier.³⁰ In his Chronicles (1580), John Stow writes, “Henry the Prince was wounded in the face with an arrow. In the meane season Hen. Percy, whilest he went before his men in the battel, preasing upon his enimies, was sodeinley slaine, which being knowne, the Kings enemies fled,” the agent of Hotspur's death being unidentified.³¹ But Shakespeare will identify him as Prince Hal. Having one hero defeat the other makes sense of history and gives literary focus to human events.

Prince Hal's encountering Hotspur on the field of battle at Shrewsbury, in act 5, scene 4 of Shakespeare's play, is an accident of war, a happy one for Hal as it turns out, and although it could never have been predicted, it does correspond to a desire that Hal had expressed to his father three scenes earlier when he made this proposal:

For my part, I may speak it to my shame,
I have a truant been to chivalry;
And so I hear he [Hotspur] doth account me too;
Yet this before my father's majesty—
I am content that he shall take the odds
Of his great name and estimation,
And will, to save the blood on either side,
Try fortune with him in a single fight.

(5.1.93-100)

The chief classical progenitor of Hal's offer to fight Hotspur in a duel is the similar offer of Turnus to fight Aeneas, spoken to Latinus, at the beginning of the final book of the Aeneid. And both duels come to pass, against the stated wishes of King Henry and Latinus, mortal conflicts between the great warriors on opposing sides—that of Hal and Hotspur in act 5, scene 4, that of Turnus and Aeneas at the end of book 12, several hundred lines after the proposal to Latinus. Hector and Achilles fight also, and so for that matter do Hamlet and Laertes, but the distinctive point about Turnus and Hal is that they explicitly propose their duels—and although the proposals are rejected, the duels will happen anyway.

In act 3, scene 2, his major confrontation with his father, Hal in some ways anticipates the proposal he will make in 5.1. In the earlier scene Hal says,

                                                                                          For the time will come
That I shall make this northern youth exchange
His glorious deeds for my indignities.
Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf,
And I will call him to so strict account
That he shall render every glory up,
Yea, even the slightest worship of his time,
Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(3.2.144-52)

Although Hal is claiming here that he will eventually take credit for the “glorious deeds” Hotspur is amassing, such credit could come from his army's defeating Hotspur's, not necessarily one man's defeating the other. The words are a general prophecy for the future, moreover, a statement that everything is going to be well, not a specific promise that it will be done in a certain way. (As readers or auditors, we of course note what Hal says and take it as further evidence that a duel is promised to us as the climax of the play; ever since the nature of the two young men as foils to each other became clear—in King Henry's comparison of them in the play's opening scene—we have had expectations, based upon literary experiences of foreshadowing and climax, of such a duel.) And what Henry is hearing, what is registering on his consciousness, is surely not a battlefield tactic but a larger guarantee that his son will mend his ways. The prince has strayed, and now he promises to be princely, to do what is expected of him—as he had promised the audience in his soliloquy at the end of 1.2 (“So when this loose behavior I throw off, / And pay the debt I never promised …” [203-4]), as he will promise again in 5.1 (“I may speak it to my shame, / I have a truant been to chivalry”). And here, in 3.2, the battle, if battle there is to be, is far off, its name, place, date, conditions, stakes, even armies (for who could foresee that Northumberland and Glendower will withdraw from it?) all unknown. Hal's rhetoric is accomplishing its purpose of persuading Henry of Hal's reformation; there is no need for the king to correct or contradict his son.

Book 11 of the Aeneid ends with the Italian cavalry defeated and humiliated by the Trojans, with Turnus abandoning the ambush that might have destroyed Aeneas, and with the Trojans arriving before Latium and setting up camp for the night. The Rutulian king Turnus, it will be remembered, is the great adversary of Aeneas in the second half of the Aeneid; to Aeneas, Turnus will lose his chosen woman (Lavinia), his land (Italy), and his life. “In the evident symmetry of the poem's design,” W. A. Camps writes, “the fate of Dido [in the first half of the Aeneid] is balanced by that of Turnus the rival. Both are books of the destiny of Rome and Juno's opposition to it, and the Italian phase of his story ends in his death as the Carthaginian phase ends in hers.”³² It is all unspeakably sad, Virgil's own alliance with history to destroy his best creations.

The next book, 12, begins with Turnus enraged by the sight of “the Latins, failing, broken, / With Mars against them” (12.1-2 [1-2])³³ and probably also by the memory of a slain comrade, the warrior maiden Camilla, and the knowledge of opportunity missed. He explodes to Latinus,

                              “Turnus won't keep them waiting;
No reason for these cowards to renounce
Their bargain. Start the holy ritual, father,
Arrange the terms. I go to meet the Trojan;
Let the Latins sit and watch it if they want to,
And this right arm will send him down to Hell,
The renegade from Asia. I alone
Answer the argument that calls us cowards,
I, with one single sword. Or we are beaten
And he takes Lavinia home.”

(12.12-21 [11-17])

In the war council of book 11, Turnus had told his comrades that he would be willing to fight a duel with Aeneas (486-99 [434-44]); it is now time for this duel. This earlier promise, which parallels Hal's statement to his father in 3.2 of 1 Henry IV that “I will call [Hotspur] to so strict account / That he shall render every glory up,” is itself provoked by the taunting of Drances in the same war council:

“Be bold, have confidence,—and face Aeneas!
So Turnus have his royal bride, no matter
If we, cheap souls, a herd unwept, unburied,
Lie strewn across the field. O son of Mars,
If son you really are, the challenger
Is calling: dare you look him in the face?”

(11.417-22 [370-75])

Bitter about all the men, the “cheap souls,” who will be sacrificed to feed Turnus's ambition, Drances calls into question the other man's courage. Will his behavior now show this son of Daunus to be, figuratively, the son of Mars? Turnus responds to the dare:

                                                  “If I am summoned
Alone to meet Aeneas, if I alone
Am obstinate about your common welfare
If such is your decision, my hands have never
Found victory so shrinking or elusive
That I should fear the risk. Bring on your Trojan!”

(486-91 [434-38])

Often tried in arms, unlike Prince Hal, his reputation made and courage proven, Turnus nevertheless responds to Drances with anger at the suggestion that he might be unwilling to face Aeneas.

These speeches in the war council, then, are the prelude to Turnus's speech at the beginning of book 12. If Hal's proposal to his father of a duel with Hotspur superficially resembles Turnus's proposal to Latinus (whom he calls “father” in “Start the holy ritual, father, / Arrange the terms” [fer sacra, pater, et concipe foedus]) of a duel with Aeneas, a consideration of the materials from which the proposals arise shows the resemblance to be only superficial. Once dared by Drances, who had implied that Turnus would be a coward in the face of Aeneas, recalling his own outraged denial of that charge, and now in extremis with the Trojan army at the gate, Turnus will of course do anything to prevent the destruction of Latium and its inhabitants. By contrast, Hal, sharpening his earlier vague promises that the time would come when he would act, would be himself, would show Hotspur who is the better man, now offers to pay another “debt I never promised” and fight Hotspur. Not only unprepared for, the offer is not an expression of his character, as Turnus's is, is not the way to his self-fulfillment, is little more than a spontaneous boast, and so of course Henry turns him down.

As Latinus turns down the offer of Turnus, or tries to, so does Henry dismiss Hal's offer, but in a single sentence:

And, Prince of Wales, so dare we venture thee,
Albeit considerations infinite
Do make against it.

(5.1.101-3)

The considerations infinite, we suspect, can be reduced easily to one consideration finite: Hal might lose. Even if he were “the theme of honour's tongue” and “riot and dishonor stain[ed] the brow” of Hotspur (1.1.80, 84), and not the other way round, Hal might lose. (After all, in the event the honorable Hotspur will lose to the dishonored Hal.) No responsible commander in chief will risk loss of that which might be achieved at great cost simply to avoid that cost, not if the desired end is worth achieving, as Clausewitz argues.³⁴ Interestingly, it is Hotspur who most eloquently warns against the perils of putting all one's eggs into a single basket. Learning that his father will not join in the battle (but not yet knowing of Glendower's withdrawal), Hotspur tells Worcester,

                                                  His [Northumberland's] present want
Seems more than we shall find it. Were it good
To set the exact wealth of all our states
All at one cast? to set so rich a main
On the nice hazard of one doubtful hour?

(4.1.44-48)

Not being in the battle, Northumberland will essentially be in reserve; whatever happens at Shrewsbury, the rebels will have another chance. To have the whole war depend upon a single battle, like having one's fortune depend upon “one cast” of the dice, would be foolish, and even more foolish, Henry knows, to have a war depend upon a single duel between two men. And so he says no to Hal's brave (sounding) words.

Where Henry decides, Latinus reasons, pleads. Much earlier he had learned that “the portents / Of the high gods opposed” marriage of his daughter Lavinia to Turnus or any other Italian (7.54-55 [58]). The voice of his father, Faunus, spoke to him in a dream: “‘My son, / Seek not a Latin husband for the princess / … stranger sons are coming / To wed our children, to exalt our title / High as the stars …’” (92-96 [96-99]). When he met Aeneas, Latinus saw that this was the man, the stranger son: “‘Your king,’” he tells the Trojans, “‘must be the man [the oracles] promise, / If I have any sense of divination. / He is the one I choose’” (283-85 [272-73]). But then, Turnus enraged, the Fury Allecto, set on by Juno, sowing the seeds of war among the Italians, Latinus could not make them honor his choice: “Latinus could not conquer / [The Italians'] blind determination. Things were going / As Juno willed” (607-9 [591]). Acceding to the demands of Turnus, Latinus “relinquished / The reins of power” (618-19 [600]), for which entirely involuntary action he will blame himself in book 12.

Now, in book 12, Latinus renounces his earlier wavering—“It was not right for me to give my daughter / To any of her former native suitors, / And gods and men so prophesied” (12.32-34 [27-28]—and begs Turnus to “break off the conflict” (49 [39]). But “The king's appeal / Moved Turnus not at all” (56-57 [45-46]); Queen Amata, too, now entreats him not to fight Aeneas, but he tells her, “‘Do not, O mother, follow me with tears / Or any such omens as I go to battle. / Turnus can not delay his death’” (91-93 [72-74]) and commands Idmon to deliver his challenge to Aeneas. Although in desiring to duel Aeneas, Turnus resembles Prince Hal, in intuiting that he marches inexorably toward his death, Turnus anticipates Hotspur (e.g., “Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily” [4.1.134]). Indeed, the reflection of Aeneas and Turnus in Hal and Hotspur is distinct but variable: Turnus suggests a duel, and so does Hal. But Turnus's doing so happens in a moment of customary uncontrollable rage; that the character known as Hal and then as Henry V ever becomes angry and loses his self-control, at least before the play Henry V, is far from certain.³⁵ But like Turnus, Hotspur is often angry. Turnus fights Aeneas and loses; Hal fights Hotspur and wins. As K. W. Gransden shows, however, Virgil's characters bear the same shifting relationships to the heroes of the Iliad, Aeneas at one moment recalling Hector, at another Achilles.³⁶

Defeating Hotspur at Shrewsbury, Hal completes his own transformation from Turnus into Aeneas, a transformation hinted at since the beginning of the play, as we shall see below. However, whereas Aeneas, once challenged, eagerly anticipates his duel, his probable victory, and an end to strife,

                                                  But if Victory grants us,
As I expect, and may the gods confirm it,
To win the battle, I will not have Italians
Be subject to the Trojans; I crave no kingdom,
Not for myself: let both, unbeaten nations,
On equal terms enter eternal concord.

(12.218-23 [187-91])

Hal, once his father has turned down his stated desire to fight Hotspur, sets the idea aside. With Turnus's sister Juturna once again causing the Italians to erupt into open warfare, the duel is not immediate; but it comes, and when it does, and with it the defeat of Turnus and the end of Virgil's poem, we may assume that the larger goals articulated by Aeneas, of having “unbeaten nations, / On equal terms enter eternal concord” are realized. Although Hal's defeat of Hotspur ends Shakespeare's play, almost, more fighting remains; in his final speech King Henry directs his troops toward various theaters of operations, hopeful that then “Rebellion in this land shall lose his sway, / Meeting the check of such another day” (5.5.41-42). But confronting Hotspur at Shrewsbury, Hal has no lofty, national goals. Rather, he says,

I am the Prince of Wales, and think not, Percy,
To share with me in glory any more:
Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,
Nor can one England brook a double reign
Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.

(5.4.62-66)

After he has all but forgotten his stated desire to fight Hotspur alone, Hal gets what he wants—or what he wanted. Challenging Hotspur, Hal imitates Turnus; defeating Hotspur, Hal imitates Aeneas, but our perception of the imitations leaves us aware of the gulf between Aeneas's victory, for (the future of) Rome, and Hal's, for himself.

3. THE IMITATION OF AENEAS

No utterance of Prince Hal's in 1 Henry IV is more celebrated than his soliloquy in act 1, scene 2 after Falstaff and Poins leave him alone in his apartment. Hal tells us then not only who he is, or will be, a proper prince, but what his method is, to veil himself from the world until the time is right, and why he so proceeds—because he has the time to do so, to play holidays for the time being, and because when he becomes himself he will be more impressive than if he had appeared as himself all along. Throughout this soliloquy Hal is concerned with his being looked at, seen, and with the effect that vision will have on the viewers. He will, he says, continue to “awhile uphold / The unyoked humour of [his companions'] idleness”:

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted he may be more wonder'd at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

(1.2.192-98)

The natural effect Hal describes—the alteration of a day as the sun breaks forth from behind clouds that had concealed it and is then perceived as the more attractive for having been concealed—recalls even as it reverses the process of Shakespeare's Sonnets 33-34, where a good day, “a glorious morning,” deteriorates into a bad one, “The region cloud” coming to mask the sun. Katherine Duncan-Jones notes that “base clouds” in sonnet 34, line 3 (“To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way”), “suggests unworthy companions, like the ‘base contagious clouds’ surrounding Prince Hal in Eastcheap, 1H4 1.2.93.”³⁷ Hal's language is not merely descriptive of a natural effect but implies a particularly spiteful attitude toward his companions—that they are “base and contagious,” that they “smother,” that they are “foul and ugly mists / Of vapours.” How can Hal, feeling thus, abide his association with them?

According to Hal, a bad day will hugely improve when, in imitation of the sun of the heavens, this son of the king defies everyone's expectations and breaks “through the foul and ugly mists / Of vapours.” (The day will, of course, worsen commensurately for Falstaff, Poins, and Hal's other companions, and it is interesting that these men share the perspective of the poet/speaker of Sonnets 33-34.) This prophecy is repeated a few lines later in the soliloquy when Hal claims that with his real self “shall I falsify men's hopes” (a revealing bit of cynicism, this suggestion that people hope he will remain bad),

And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation glitt'ring o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.

(206-10)

This figure abandons the earlier progression of the day but continues Hal's fascination with being seen, with blinding, startling, or dazzling.

These words “startling” and “dazzling” perhaps recapture something of the effect that wonder, in Hal's promise to “be more wonder'd at,” possessed around the end of the sixteenth century. In Lyric Wonder, James Biester shows what powerful feelings once resided in the word wonder. Like the Latin admirabilis and the Greek deinos, wonder “register[s] especially strongly the sense of a response to something that is powerfully affective either positively or negatively, something that so repulses or attracts, or repulses and attracts, that it renders the soul incapable of normal operation. Deinos has an enormous and fascinating range of meanings, including fearful, terrible, terrifying, terrific, mighty, powerful, wonderful, marvelous, strange, able, and, notably, clever.”³⁸Wonder, too, has this range, or it did before it descended to mean mere curiosity (“I wonder what will happen”), and so did admire (from Latin admirari) before it descended to mean to regard with approval (“I admire his clothes”). So, famously, when Ferdinand calls the young woman with whom he finds himself suddenly in love “Admir'd Miranda!” (The Tempest, 3.1.37), he is in effect echoing her earlier perception of him as “A thing divine” (1.2.421), and affirming their membership in a mutual admiration society. He is claiming, as one might standing before a god, that his soul is incapable of normal operation.

When Hal promises to be more wondered at, he is promising to gain a quality that distinguished his father and separated him from King Richard and, apparently, from his son as well. Or so King Henry believes. In their encounter of act 3, scene 2 Henry tells Hal that unlike the self Hal has so far shown him, “So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men, / So stale and cheap to vulgar company,” he himself,

By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wonder'd at,
That men would tell their children, “This is he!”
Others would say, “Where, which is Bolingbroke?”

(40-41)

(This question, “Where, which is Bolingbroke?” is a singularly ironic anticipation of the same question, unspoken by Douglas in 5.3, as he mistakes one soldier after another for the king. That King Henry is unrecognizable is an early source of wonder, a later one of self-preservation.) Then Henry compares his gift, or perhaps it is his strategy of exhibiting himself, with its absence in Richard:

Thus did I keep my person fresh and new,
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne'er seen but wonder'd at, and so my state,
Seldom but sumptuous, show'd like a feast,
And wan by rareness such solemnity.
The skipping King, he ambled up and down,
With shallow jesters, and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt, carded his state,
Mingled his royalty with cap'ring fools. …

(55-63)

These words, James Biester writes, are part of “a long lecture on how ill-advised [Hal's] behavior is, how unlikely it is to gain him the kind of wonder majesty requires.” However, in some ways, because of the 1.2 soliloquy, Hal is way ahead of his father. “Throughout this speech the audience is aware, as Henry IV is not, that Hal knows the importance of wonder.”³⁹ It is Hal's intention, he tells us in his soliloquy, that “when this loose behavior I throw off, / And pay the debt I never promised,” people will be silenced, filled with wonder, amazed, astonished, stunned. Such power, to echo Bolingbroke in Richard II, is in the sight of kings.

The locus classicus of the effect Hal desires is found in book 1 of the Aeneid, when Aeneas appears to Dido. Ilioneus has just described to Dido the travails of the Trojans, their loss of homeland, prolonged journey, and arrival in Carthage, and tried to assure her of their benevolent intentions toward her people. Hidden in a cloud, Aeneas and Achates hear these words and Dido's reassurances to Ilioneus. Achates tells Aeneas that all seems well:

                                                                                And as he finished,
The cloud around them broke, dissolved in air,
Illumining Aeneas, like a god,
Light radiant around his face and shoulders,
And Venus gave him all the bloom of youth,
Its glow, its liveliness, as the artist adds
Luster to ivory, or sets in gold
Silver or marble.

(1.623-30 [586-93])

Aeneas identifies himself, thanks Dido for the reception she appears to be extending to the Trojans, and embraces some of his men.

                                                                      And Dido marvelled
At his appearance, first, and all that trouble
He had borne up under. …

(649-51 [613-14])

Dido's response is a full measure of the effect, caused by Venus, that produced it. Dido obstipuit (613; preterit of obstupesco, obstupescere): she is stunned, becomes astounded, as an inanimate thing, her normal sensory mechanisms suspended. (Perhaps Robert Fitzgerald's translation is stronger and more immediate: “Sidonian Dido / Stood in astonishment, first at the sight / Of such a captain, then at his misfortune. …”)⁴⁰ Kenneth Quinn comments on this manifestation of Aeneas and Dido's reaction: “It is the moment for Aeneas to reveal himself. Magically the cloud that had enveloped him and Achates evaporates, and Aeneas confronts Dido with all the splendour of a divine epiphany.”⁴¹ Becoming himself, bursting forth from a cloud, from the “mists / Of vapors” with which Venus had concealed him, Aeneas becomes a presence where there had been an absence, and he shows us, in Dido's momentary speechlessness, what it really is to be “wondered at.”

Virgil provides an epic model that is inimitable in realistic drama. Where Shakespeare does have gods or other supernatural beings present themselves to humans, he does so in a masque—Iris and Ceres to the court party in The Tempest—thus canceling any need for even the pretense of verisimilitude, or in a dream—Jupiter's appearance to Posthumus in Cymbeline; or else he deliberately ignores the potential for magic and mystery, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream when Titania, awakened by Bottom's singing, presumably just stands up and speaks to him. But these three plays, romantic comedy or romance, are at a very great remove from a history like 1 Henry IV. Prince Hal, the man who would be Aeneas, does not have a goddess for a mother; in Shakespeare, he effectively has no mother at all—interesting for a man who possesses both a real and a surrogate father.⁴²

Neither does Hal show the romantic inclinations that might be expected in a young man. If in his movement from Falstaff's tavern world to his father's court world, he goes from private to public life, it should be noted that the private life is a kind of microcosm of public life, in which Hal's principal goal is to impress, to win, a constituency (to prepare to “command all the good lads in Eastcheap” [2.4.14]), but not to gratify libidinal yearnings that must needs be hidden or suppressed later on.⁴³ Of the sexual Hal who reportedly claimed in Richard II that “he would unto the stews, / And from the common'st creature pluck a glove, / And wear it as a favour” (5.3.16-18), there is no trace in 1 Henry IV, nor anywhere again until, barely, his bloodless wooing of Princess Katherine at the end of Henry V. Affairs of the heart do not loom large in 1 Henry IV, to be sure, but somehow they hover on its outskirts—in Hotspur's love for Kate, in “the deadly spite that angers” Mortimer, his inability to converse with a “wife [who] can speak no English, [and] I no Welsh” (3.1.186-87); and in the odd affection shown by Falstaff and the married Hostess in the tavern; war, we might say, preempts love in the man's world of this play, but a fuller world is hinted at. Hal, however, does not participate in it. When Aeneas astonishes, he astonishes a woman, prelude, of course, to one of the signal tragic love affairs in literature, in which for a time Aeneas and Dido become “Heedless of ruling, prisoners of passion” (4.192 [193-94]). When Hal expresses what can be understood as a desire to imitate Aeneas, all erotic possibilities are absent from the expression, and if we perceive the effort at imitation, we perceive also how diminished Aeneas's range of feeling has become in Hal.

What is true of Hal in relation to Aeneas is true of him in relation to Turnus, also, and of King Henry in relation to Patroclus; these truths, indeed, are the fruits of Shakespeare's employment of imitations of Homer and Virgil as a critique of king and prince in 1 Henry IV. Patroclus goes into battle dressed as another man, thus showing extreme courage and a willingness to die as that other and for his people; Henry sends others into battle dressed as himself, thus showing a cunning capacity to sacrifice his followers to his own preservation. Turnus wishes to have everything turn upon a duel of two men, and eventually it does so; Hal claims to have the same wish, but the ardency of his desire is suspect, though he too gets what he says he wants. And this same Hal asserts as a principle of personal strategy the achievement of Aeneas, divinely aided, to burst forth from a cloud and astonish, but the principle that enlarges Aeneas restricts Hal. The world of Henry IV is smaller than that of classical epic, but the playwright, Shakespeare, perceives and then uses this earlier world to define the nature of his characters.

PROLEPTIC MIMESIS

The long and complex fourth scene of act 2 of 1 Henry IV looks backward and forward in time, backward to the robbery of the travelers near Gad's Hill two scenes earlier, then forward to Prince Hal's fateful interview with his father two scenes later. Looking to the past, 2.4 offers competing interpretive narratives of exactly what happened in the confusion of a few hours ago; looking to the future, it seeks to anticipate, and perhaps by anticipation to determine, what will happen at court the next morning. On the play's terms, both the robbery and the interview, once they have occurred, are actual historical events, although it is possible to differentiate between their degrees of reality. Hal's interview with his father has consequences not only for the rest of this play but, viewed historically, for English history henceforth. (Without it, Hal would not have gone into battle, the rebels would have won, Henry IV would have been dethroned. …) By contrast, the robbery of the travelers is less, it will turn out, than the kind of petty crime that can happen to anyone but that has no larger public consequences. No one is harmed in the robbery, and a little later the money is returned. It is as if it never happened; the crime becomes a piece of make-believe; so far as we can tell, it is just like the other crimes committed by Falstaff and his “squires of the night's body,” the imitation of a reality. Thus the narratives of it in 2.4 are imitations of imitations—invented accounts, that is, of burlesques of real robberies. (Presented in literary art, they are actually imitations of imitations of imitations.) Still, unlike the battle of Shrewsbury, both the robbery and the interview have their sources primarily in Shakespeare's imagination, although with some hints for the former provided by the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth; they are as real as anything else in the play, like the royal council of 1.1, the alliance of rebels in 3.1, and the death of Hotspur in 5.4, matters for which Shakespeare is variously indebted to Holinshed, Stow, Samuel Daniel, and the Mirror for Magistrates. Each is an action (“A thing done, a deed. … usually viewed as occupying some time in doing …”),⁴⁴ and the representations of these actions in 2.4, therefore, are imitations of external reality, one after and one before the fact. And they are no less imitations for their apparent failures to correspond very closely to the realities imitated.

In act 2, scene 2, Falstaff, Peto, Bardolph, and Gadshill set upon four travelers, rob them, and bind them. Then, masked, the prince and Poins, who have witnessed from hiding at least the final moments of this robbery, in which Falstaff had expected their participation, set upon and rob the robbers, all of whom run from them though Falstaff exchanges “a blow or two” (2.2.102 s.d.) first. As Hal and Poins are about to attack the others, Hal says, “now could thou and I rob the thieves, and go merrily to London, it would be argument for a week, laughter for a month, and a good jest for ever” (92-95), a variation on Poins's reason for proposing the robbery in the first place: “The virtue of this jest will be the incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will tell us when we meet at supper … and in the reproof of this lives the jest” (1.2.182-85). When they all meet in the tavern two scenes later, Falstaff offers the incomprehensible lies that Poins had predicted: that he and his cohort fought “two rogues in buckram suits” (2.4.189-90), “Four rogues in buckram” (192-93), seven men with swords (198-99), “nine in buckram” (210), and finally eleven men (216). “O monstrous!” Hal exclaims. “eleven buckram men grown out of two!” (215-16)—an inconsistency, even an impossibility, that would be evident to any reasonably attentive auditor, whether or not he possessed ocular proof of the contrary. So although Falstaff's imitation in 2.4 corresponds poorly to the events of 2.2 that it purports to represent, it seems unlikely that he expected it to be accepted as truth.

After Hal and Poins expose yet another inconsistency—Falstaff's claim that the men who robbed him wore “Kendal green” though he could not have known what they wore since “it was so dark, Hal, that thou couldst not see thy hand” (218-20)—Hal offers “a plain tale” (252) that corresponds well to what the audience actually saw: “Then did we two set on you four, and, with a word, out-faced you from your prize, and have it, yea, and can show it you here in the house” (252-55). However, at Poins's invitation—“Come, let's hear, Jack, what trick hast thou now?” (267)—Falstaff gets the last word, which implicitly grants the truth of what Hal has said (though without referring to details of Hal's narrative) while justifying his own behavior: “the lion will not touch the true prince; instinct is a great matter. I was now a coward on instinct; I shall think the better of myself (and thee) during my life—I for a valiant lion, and thou for a true prince” (266-71). Hal had said that the whole incident would provide “a good jest for ever” (2.2.95), and surely this moral that Falstaff spins out will remain a large part of that jest, and its conclusion, which means that Falstaff is coauthor of the enduring imitation of the robbery of the travelers.⁴⁵

Given the play's large concerns with the relation of the authentic to the counterfeit—in the identity of the King of England, for instance, and the nature and intentions of the Prince of Wales⁴⁶—it is unsurprising that the relative truth in narratives of events, and their meanings, also should be scrutinized. Hotspur speaks of the former king as “Richard, that sweet lovely rose” (1.3.175); Henry calls him “The skipping King, [who] ambled up and down” (3.2.60); to test these judgments, though perhaps both are correct, one must review all the evidence about that king in Richard II. So who, in 2.4 of 1 Henry IV, better describes the events of 2.2, Hal or Falstaff? Hal's account in 2.4.250-61 corresponds well to what we saw two scenes earlier, but Falstaff's, since it is about instincts, motives, what is inside him, is unprovable, untestable even, beyond the judgment right or wrong, correct or incorrect, authentic or counterfeit. It is part of the “jest” that both Hal and Poins sought, indeed the final part, not the “reproof” Poins had promised, but the jest's meaning. Falstaff concludes his speech on the lion and the true prince by proposing they perform “a play extempore” (275-76). Hal agrees and suggests that “the argument shall be thy running away” (277-78). “Ah, no more of that, Hal, and thou lovest me!” (279), replies Falstaff, who gets what he wants when the proceedings are interrupted by the Hostess's entrance to announce “a nobleman of the court at door [who] would speak with [the prince]” (283-84). When Falstaff (in a sly imitation of Hal, or perhaps a usurpation of his role) goes to speak to the nobleman, Bardolph and Peto fill the prince in on some details of the robbery's aftermath, but except for the prince's choric repetitions of the word “instinct” (296, 314, 351), the argument of Falstaff's running away is forgotten, or left to morally hypersensitive critics of the play.⁴⁷

Falstaff returns from the nobleman of the court with information about the real world's intrusion on life in the tavern: “There's villainous news abroad: here was Sir John Bracy from your father,” he tells the prince. “You must to the court in the morning” (329-31). He reveals parts of the villainous news: “That same mad fellow of the north, Percy, and he of Wales”—soon identified by Poins as Owen Glendower—“and his son-in-law Mortimer, and old Northumberland, and that sprightly Scot of Scots, Douglas” (331-32, 337-39)—all are … “there” is all Falstaff says (352), without saying where “there” is or for what purpose these rebels are assembled. Maybe place and purpose are known well enough to require no explanation, though both would be part of the villainous news. Another part of this news, perhaps from Falstaff's perspective the most villainous, is what it means for Prince Hal—that the time for “playing holidays” is over—and therefore for Falstaff himself—that the man he loves, the spiritual center of his life, is being removed, and that he will be left, physically and emotionally, in another unspecified, unknown “there.”⁴⁸ This development is the circumstance Falstaff has dreaded always, as he revealed to us in the very first words he ever spoke, “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?” (1.2.1), a muted expression of fear of the future, and in the obsession he displays throughout the play's second scene with what is to be: “Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty” (23-25), “[S]hall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king? (57-58), and “Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief” (59-60). If Falstaff has nightmares, the king's summoning his son must be at their center.

The next morning's encounter of father and son, king and prince, not anybody's running away, becomes the subject of two plays extempore that Hal and Falstaff then perform. It is Falstaff who proposes this subject, when he says, “If thou love me, practice an answer” to what will be demanded of him in the morning, and Hal assigns Falstaff a role in the drama, “Do thou stand for my father, and examine me upon the particulars of my life” (370-73). The choice of this subject needs no justification beyond its availability; Falstaff, after all, had proposed that they be merry and “have a play extempore” before Bracy had arrived at the tavern. Dramatic interludes, as I shall refer to these brief sequences,⁴⁹ are part of the holidays Hal has not quite yet renounced. As Grace Tiffany writes, “[B]oth interactions are performative, played in front of audiences of cheering cronies in good-humored contests for best theatrical effect.”⁵⁰ They are plays, more or less formal theatrical imitations with plots, assigned roles, beginnings and ends, and so forth, and are manifestations of play, of the ludic spirit that Falstaff embodies, to which the Hostess enthusiastically responds, “O Jesu, this is excellent sport, i' faith” (386). Her implicit view of these interludes as special, a thing apart, allies them with Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet. King Henry's summons of his son to him conveniently furnishes a particular subject, but in lieu of that summons, another subject would have been found. On the other hand, it is difficult to dismiss the notion that Falstaff, by speculating about the future, through the vehicle of these interludes, hopes to control it.

In his discussion of Henry IV as saturnalian revel, C. L. Barber remarks that “by turning on Falstaff as a scapegoat, as the villagers turned on their Mardi Gras, the prince can free himself from the sins, the ‘bad luck,’ of Richard's reign and of his father's reign, to become a king in whom chivalry and a sense of divine ordination are restored.”⁵¹ This effort by Hal is visible only if one is aware of the underlying ritual; it is not a conscious act, a deliberate choice. Falstaff's interludes are similar devices not merely for ascertaining the future, but for shaping it, for erasing any bad luck that might otherwise be there. It is proverbial that by imagining the worst possibility the future can hold, we cancel that possibility; and also, paradoxically, that by imagining the best possibility, we allow for its realization. The interludes, like the ancient Sortes Virgilianiæ, in which a passage in a literary text is picked by chance and then interpreted as an oracular observation, are used to know the future, except that enactment is substituted for reading; but as the decipherment of the Sortes is never independent of what one wants the future to be, so the interludes are not neutral, are not divorced from Falstaff's desire that the king leave him alone, that he not disturb the status quo.

After Falstaff had suggested that Hal “practice an answer” for the next day's interview, Hal had invited him to “stand for my father, and examine me upon the particulars of my life.” In the first of the interludes, therefore, Falstaff is cast as the king while Hal remains himself. In a sense, then, since Hal's apparent identity has not changed, only Falstaff assumes a role; but in another sense, since Falstaff has all along been a symbolic father to Hal—more truly, since his proximity to Hal has made us wonder how fully he has acknowledged the tasks and obligations of fatherhood⁵²—Falstaff, too, is perhaps playing himself, or wishing he were doing so. As King, in any event, Falstaff takes as his subject—his “argument”—Falstaff. In the first of his two speeches, parodying Lyly's Euphues (“For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears” [396-98]),⁵³ Falstaff anatomizes Hal's behavior (“Shall the son of England prove a thief and take purses?” [405-6]) and reproves him for “the company thou keepest” (409-10), yet notes that “there is a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company, but I know not his name” (413-14). In his only speech in this interlude, Hal asks, “What manner of man, and it like Your Majesty?” (415), to which “the king” responds with a description of Falstaff, or Falstaff responds with a description of himself, “A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent” (416), a sudden recollection that “his name is Falstaff” (419-20), the admonition to “him keep with, the rest [of his companions] banish” (424), and a request for information: “And tell me now, thou naughty varlet, tell me, where hast thou been this month?” (424-26). Falstaff's advertisement for himself is too much for Hal, who interrupts the interlude and proposes another, in which their roles will be reversed: “Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and I'll play my father” (427-28).

In this first interlude of thirty-two lines Falstaff has not examined Hal “upon the particulars of my life” beyond specifying a few of them, despite the agreement that such would be the purpose of the exchange; he has, instead, substituted himself for Hal as an object of scrutiny, then posited his own virtue, and finally advised Hal to continue his association with this companion. But the subject is less the behavior of Hal than it is the worth of Falstaff. If that worth is demonstrable, then Hal's behavior will not alter, and the absence of any alteration, rather the continuation of what seems long to have existed, is what Falstaff wants. To the extent that Falstaff has been a father, he would continue as a father. As an anticipation of act 3, scene 2, Falstaff is creating an image of himself as a valuable companion to the prince that he hopes the king will endorse. Immediately, that is, Falstaff wants Hal to believe in him, but in what will come the next day, he wants Henry to believe in him.

When Hal challenges Falstaff's interpretation of his kingly role and proposes that they exchange parts, Falstaff exclaims, “Depose me?” (429)—a pointed reminder of how members of the royal family become kings. Like father, like son: as Henry IV became king by deposing Richard II, so does this son of Henry in the first interlude become king in the second by deposing his father (approximately what Henry will perceive as Hal's intention in 2 Henry IV after Hal has taken and donned the sleeping king's crown: “Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair / That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honours / Before thy hour be ripe?” [4.5.94-96]). As the two interludes are what I am calling proleptic imitations of Hal's showdown with his father, so is the second of them an imitation of the first—each a dialogue between the King of England and the Prince of Wales—as, simultaneously, the advancement of Hal from prince in the first to king in the second imitates, again proleptically, his real such advancement at the end of 2 Henry IV. Whereas, for instance, the first interlude leaves open the possibility that there will be a place for Falstaff in the life of King Henry V, the second forecloses that possibility, just as the new king will reject Falstaff at the end of the next play. So Hal's deposing Falstaff (as king) in act 2 of 1 Henry IV looks forward to his deposing him (as Falstaff) in act 5 of 2 Henry IV.

The second interlude, with forty-one lines, is slightly longer than the first, and contains eleven speeches instead of three, but it, too, examines particulars of the life of Falstaff, not of Hal. In the long speech (439-53) beginning, “Swearest thou, ungracious boy? Henceforth ne'er look on me,” and in the sentence (457-58) that follows Falstaff's response to this speech, “King Henry” describes Falstaff, “a devil [that] haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man,” to “Hal” in thoroughly scurrilous terms (“that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies”), some of which (“devil,” “reverend vice,” “grey Iniquity,” “villainous … in all things,” “old white-bearded Satan”) have been seized upon by critics eager to allegorize Falstaff as one kind of incarnation of wickedness or another. And one term in this harangue, “villainous abominable misleader of youth,” has been seen, more promisingly, as allying Falstaff with Socrates, who in Plato's Apology (24b-c) defends himself from the same charge.⁵⁴

After Hal, as the king, concludes his opening indictment, “[W]herein worthy but in nothing?” (453), Falstaff, as Hal, replies, “I would Your Grace would take me with you: whom means Your Grace?” (454-55). The pretended bafflement at the identity of the object of Hal's remarks echoes Hal's similar pretense in the first interlude, “What manner of man, and it like Your Majesty?” Both of these questions must have stimulated hilarity among the company listening in the inn, and especially the second: for if the audience to the interludes knew that Falstaff had to mean himself by the “virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company,” and were therefore amused that Hal did not see that meaning, or pretended not to, how much more evident is Falstaff's presence in “that trunk of humors, that bolting-hutch of beastliness,” and how much funnier, therefore, Falstaff's failure to recognize himself. Laughter can be stimulated by a sense of disproportion, here between what should be evident to everybody and what is in fact evident to Falstaff—or what he claims is evident. And so the line brings down the house, as, when Hal has identified “Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan,” does Falstaff's “My lord, the man I know,” an understatement because obviously he knows the man extremely well since, in “real life,” he is the man.⁵⁵

This merriment must increase through the first sentences of Falstaff's apologia pro vita sua that follows (“If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!”); one wonders whether and when some of the audience in the inn are able to hear the mounting desperation in Falstaff's long final sentence, from “No, my good lord, banish Peto” to “banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” (468, 473-74). The sentence is complicated, for it never ceases being funny (in, for instance, the solemn but dramatic progression, auxesis in classical rhetoric, of “for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff”) while at the same time it dawns upon audience, in the tavern and in the theater, and reader that this man is fighting for his life. The second interlude is a proleptic imitation of the next day's interview, but breaking through this imitation is the genuine, nontheatrical desperation of Falstaff, as he fears, rightly, that he will be abandoned. “[B]anish plump Jack,” he says, “and banish all the world,” and the king, that is the prince, replies, “I do, I will”: I do banish plump Jack, I will banish all the world he represents, all his world. Looking forward to the next day, the response tells us that there will be no room for Falstaff in the world of King Henry, which Hal is about to join.

In “of the Affection of Fathers to Their Children” (II, 8) Montaigne describes the moment when Gallic sons first appeared to their fathers: “Amongst other particular customes, which our ancient Gaules had, (as Cæsar affirmeth) this was one, that children never came before their fathers, nor were in any publike assembly seene in their company, but when they began to beare armes; as if they would infer, that then was the time, fathers should admit them to their acquaintance and familiarity.”⁵⁶ Florio's “particular customs” (coustumes particulieres) means peculiar or singular customs, not merely specific ones; and whatever Montaigne might have thought of ancient Gallic practice, it is imitated in the royal family of 1 Henry IV, where Hal first appears to his father (who had known of him in Richard II only through the report of others) only when he is ready to bear arms. The encounter of father and son in act 3, scene 2 mediates between its proleptic imitations in the interludes of act 2 and the Battle of Shrewsbury in act 5, when the fruits of Prince Hal's allegiance become visible, when his long promised reformation glitters over his fault.

The most spectacular difference between the interludes and the real thing is that Falstaff, the persistent subject of the former, is present in the latter only insofar as he is a trace in the consciousness of the reader or auditor; in the explicit dialogue of king and prince he is as absent as if he had never existed. The scene begins with the king's dismissing his attendants:

Lords, give us leave; the Prince of Wales and I
Must have some private conference: but be near at hand,
For we shall presently have need of you.

(3.2.1-3)

That their conference will be private in the sense Henry intends itself differentiates it from the earlier interludes, which, although a manifestation of private life in contradistinction to the public world of courts, diplomacy, and warfare, were nevertheless performed before, and in part for the benefit of, an audience of the Hostess, Poins, Peto, Bardolph, and some others. By contrast, King Henry will talk to his son before no one; this lack of an audience emphasizes the serious, consequential, nonludic character of the exchange, and although Henry cannot know so, it also furthers Hal's intention to become wondered at—like Aeneas bursting forth from a cloud—as he could not do if he were generally known to be responding to the reprimands of his father.

Henry does not talk about Falstaff or Hal's other companions, though he refers to them collectively as “rude society” (14), “vulgar company” (41), and “vile participation” (87) for which Hal has shown “inordinate and low desires” (12). He does talk about Richard and himself to advance the thesis that familiarity breeds contempt: Richard “being daily swallow'd by men's eyes, / They surfeited with honey, and began / To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little / More than a little is by much too much” (70-73), whereas Henry “did … keep my person fresh and new, / My presence, like a robe pontifical, / Ne'er seen but wonder'd at, and so my state, / Seldom, but sumptuous, show'd like a feast, / And wan by rareness such solemnity” (55-59). And Henry talks especially about Hotspur in the way that fathers, from time immemorial, have used a good boy as a weapon to scourge a bad or negligent son. But few sons have been asked to measure their failings against one

                                                                                whose high deeds,
Whose hot incursions and great name in arms,
Holds from all soldiers chief majority
And military title capital
Through all the kingdoms that acknowledge Christ.

(107-11)

Hotspur contains no flaws that weaken this image presented by the King, none at least that are known to Hal, and Hal possesses no demonstrable virtues that would allow him to set himself beside Hotspur and thus make less stark the contrast his father has presented. All he can do is offer to take from Hotspur what Hotspur has accumulated, and this great achievement Hal promises his father:

I will redeem all this on Percy's head,
And in the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you that I am your son …

and

                                                                                For the time will come
That I shall make this northern youth exchange
His glorious deeds for my indignities.
Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf,
And I will call him to so strict account
That he shall render every glory up,
Yea, even the slightest worship of his time,
Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(132-34, 144-52)

This wholly admirable Hal-that-is-to-be corresponds to “sweet Jack Falstaff … valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff” of the second interlude, each figure the creation of his own rhetoric.

King Henry, however, is convinced; he believes because the language is brilliant, persuasive, stirring, and because, as a father, he wants to believe that the son Hal is describing to him is his real son. But rather than state this newfound conviction in private, personal, or familial terms, Henry proclaims its huge political meaning:

A hundred thousand rebels die in this—
Thou shalt have charge and sovereign trust herein.

(160-61)

Hal has said that he will make Hotspur “render every glory up,” to him, “Yea, even the slightest worship of his time.” This settlement he has promised “in the name of God,” and he has sworn further that “I will die a hundred thousand deaths / Ere break the smallest parcel of this vow” (153, 158-59). King Henry conflates the reckoning guaranteed to Hotspur with Hal's surety of his own hundred thousand deaths and comes up with the prediction of a hundred thousand rebel deaths. The field at Shrewsbury will produce much carnage, including not only most of Falstaff's ragtag company (“[T]here's not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town's end, to beg during life” [5.3.36-38]), but also, we can be sure, Hotspur and other rebels—men, that is, who deliberately chose the party of Northumberland, Worcester, and Hotspur over that of the king. We may doubt that there were one thousand of these. The men who would die fighting for the rebels were men with no stake in the conflict who happened to live where the rebels were strong, as in the north of England, as indeed Falstaff's men died following rather than opposing him because they were Londoners, not because they thoughtfully espoused the royalist cause. Henry's exuberance over Hal's promised reform happily expresses the waste of his own citizens.

The interludes of 2.4 proleptically imitate the encounter of father and son of 3.2, but the imitation proves not even approximate, the language, emphases, and conclusion of the latter proving hugely different from those of the former. The interludes are plays, illusions, not real events; the encounter (which we easily forget is in a play) is the real thing, is for keeps, a part of history. Controlled by Falstaff, the interludes of the earlier scene are imitations of the action that follows, as tragedy is the imitation of an action, and in the failure of that which is imitated to conform to that which imitates it lies the seed of Falstaff's own tragedy.

Notes

1. Harry Berger Jr., “On the Continuity of the Henriad: A Critique of Some Literary and Thematic Approaches” in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 226. Berger is extending the thesis of Derek A. Traversi, Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 2.

2. Berger, “On the Continuity of the Henriad,” 227.

3. On this transition from the old to the new, see, for instance, E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (Harmondworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1944), 244-63, and Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 162.

4. W. H. Auden, “The Prince's Dog,” in The Dyer's Hand (New York: Vintage, 1968), 187.

5. Auden's fourth condition is that “He must have the capacity both by nature and by art of making others loyal to his person.”

6. Auden, “The Prince's Dog,” 188.

7. See “Troyes, treaty of” in A Dictionary of British History, ed. J. P. Kenyon (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 344.

8. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, edited by Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and New York: Columbia University Press, 1957-75), vol. 3, 412.

9. Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 201. For the episode in Sidney, see also Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 7, 402-14. For the devices of deception in Sidney for which Shakespeare substitutes Edmund's letter, see p. 409 and note 2.

10. Edmund's “Nothing,” as R. A. Foakes points out, echoes “Cordelia's response to her father at 1.1.87.” See King Lear in the Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997), 1.2.32n. And of course much attention has been paid to what Sigurd Burckhardt calls “The Quality of Nothing” in the play (the title of chapter 8 of his study Shakespearean Meanings [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], 237-59). It is worth pointing out that Richard II is similarly concerned with the myriad possibilities of “nothing,” as word and as concept, perhaps especially in Richard's complicated statement, “But whate'er I be, / Nor I, nor any man that but man is, / With nothing shall be pleas'd till he be eas'd / With being nothing” (5.5.38-41). Here, the first “nothing” means that man is never satisfied (nothing pleases him) and that he is satisfied by what is fundamentally worthless, or nothing. King Lear would understand this alliance of striving and cynicism.

11. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 3, 412-13.

12. Women, to be sure, have no monopoly on the word “womb” in Richard II. Gaunt calls England “this teeming womb of royal kings” and likens a grave to a “hollow womb” (2.1.51, 83), but it is Richard's queen who senses that “Some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune's womb / Is coming towards me …” (2.2.10-11).

13. Alvin B. Kernan, “The Henriad: Shakespeare's Major History Plays,” in Modern Shakespearean Criticism: Essays on Style, Dramaturgy, and the Major Plays, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 245.

14. See Chapman's Homer, vol. 1, The Iliad, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Princeton: Princeton University Press [Bollingen Series 41], 1967), xi, and William J. Harris, The First Printed Translations into English of the Great Foreign Classics, (rept. New York: Burt Franklin, 1970 [first published in 1909]), 75.

15. Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 31.

16. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry. Edited by Forrest G. Robinson. (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill [Library of Liberal Arts], 1970), 20.

17. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), 210.

18. W. A. Wright, ed., Henry IV, Part 1 (London, 1897). Quoted by A. R. Humphreys, ed., The First Part of King Henry the Fourth (London: Methuen, 1960 [Arden 2]), 5.3.25 n.

19. If Hotspur emphasizes the pronoun in his praise of Blunt's gallantry, “A gallant knight he was,” he can underline by implied contrast the circumspection of the king.

20. Homer, The Iliad, tr. (1898) Samuel Butler, rev. Malcolm M. Willcock (Washington Square Press, 1964), 241.

21. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (New York: Norton, 1965), 196.

22. Ibid., 201.

23. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 4, 191.

24. Perhaps nothing in the play has been the subject of more commentary than this theme of counterfeiting and the language that supports it: as a poor ruler, Richard II was a kind of counterfeit, but as the legitimate heir to his grandfather's throne, he was authentic. As a usurper, Henry IV is a counterfeit, but as a man of some good instincts, he is authentic. As a reckless prodigal, Hal seems to be a counterfeit prince, but as someone capable of redeeming both himself and his nation, he too is authentic—unlike the glory-seeking Hotspur, who proves finally another kind of counterfeit. It is not only kings but also fathers who can be measured according to their counterfeit or authentic identities, which allows for King Henry and Falstaff to be ranged variously along the spectrum, at the counterfeit end of which, according to Falstaff, are the dead—“for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man” [5.4.116-17]—and at the authentic end of which are the living, whatever they may have done to maintain that state.

25. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking, 1976), 316.

26. See Simone Weil, “The Iliad, Poem of Might” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977). Weil begins her essay: “The true hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad, is might” (153).

27. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, 200, 198.

28. A Short Guide to Clausewitz on War, ed. Roger Ashley Leonard (New York: Capricorn, 1967), 41.

29. Ibid., 42.

30. Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 4, p. 191.

31. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 191n. On the relation of Shakespeare's sources to each other and to the use he made of them here, Peter Saccio writes, “Hotspur perished [at Shrewsbury], it is not known by whose hand. (Students of Shakespeare's sources have rightly pointed out that an ambiguous sentence in Holinshed makes it possible to suppose that Hal killed Hotspur. Hall's chronicle, however, which was Holinshed's own source at this point and was possibly consulted by Shakespeare, does not convey this false suggestion, and surely Shakespeare, having arranged Hotspur's age, the king's anxieties about his son, and many passages of dialogue to bring Hal and Hotspur into competing contrast, could have invented the climactic duel of 1 Henry IV without the aid of stray ambiguities.)” (Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977], 510).

32. W. A. Camps, An Introduction to Virgil's Aeneid (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 35-36.

33. I quote The Aeneid of Virgil in the translation of Rolfe Humphries, edited by Brian Wilkie. This translation was originally published in 1951. Line numbers from the Latin text, placed in brackets after the line numbers in Humphries, are taken from the Loeb edition of Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann Ltd., rev. ed. 1934, rpt. 1960).

34. E.g., “How shall we manage to combat that extremely subtle idea, which supposes it possible, through the use of a special artificial form, to effect by a small direct destruction of the enemy's forces a much greater destruction indirectly, or by means of small but extremely well-directed blows to produce such paralysation of the enemy's forces, such a command over the enemy's will, that this mode of proceeding is to be viewed as a great shortening of the road? … [B]ut we assert that the direct destruction of the enemy's forces is everywhere predominant. …” (Clausewitz, Clausewitz on War, 132-33).

35. In Henry V the king certainly seems angry when he responds to the Dauphin's gift of tennis balls (1.2), before Harfleur (3.3), after the incident with Williams, Bates, and Court (4.1), when he gives orders to kill the French prisoners (4.6), and when he says he is: “I was not angry since I came to France / Until this instant” (4.7.54-55). Can he be bluffing at all these moments, simply pretending anger as a tactic to get what he wants?

36. K. W. Gransden, Virgil's Iliad: An Essay on Epic Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), passim.

37. Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1997 [The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series]), 34.3n [p. 178].

38. James Biester, Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 6.

39. Ibid., 72. 1 Henry IV functions as a kind of leitmotif in Biester's's book.

40. Virgil, The Aeneid, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1983), 25.

41. Kenneth Quinn, Virgil's Aeneid: A Critical Description (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 108.

42. The historical Henry married Hal's mother, Mary de Bohun, in 1380; neither she nor Henry's second wife, Joan of Navarre, whom he married in 1401, has any place in the major tetralogy.

43. On the nature of privacy in Falstaff's world, see Mark Taylor, “Falstaff and the Origins of Private Life,” Shakespeare Yearbook 3 (1992): 63-85.

44. OED, “Action,” definition I.3.

45. This Henry is much concerned with the construction of enduring myths. As king, he will predict, of the battle of Agincourt, that “This story shall the good man teach his son, / And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by / From this day to the ending of the world / But we in it shall be remembered …” (Henry V, 4.3.56-59).

46. See note 24 above.

47. Like, famously, Dr. Johnson: Falstaff “is a thief, and a glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the defenceless. At once obsequious and malignant, he satirises in their absence those whom he lives by flattering.” Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson with Jean M. O'Meara (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 188.

48. What Iago says of Bianca and her devotion to Cassio is true mutatis mutandis of Falstaff and his devotion to Hal, that “tis the strumpet's plague / To beguile many and be beguiled by one” (Othello, 4.1.97-98). It is no longer necessary, I hope, to demonstrate that selfless love (as well as selfish love) for Hal is Falstaff's predominant drive, and that in Henry V the Hostess speaks truly when she says of Falstaff, “The King has killed his heart” (2.1.87). See the appendix on Falstaff in Thomas McFarland, Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 177-211.

49. My terminology here perhaps requires an explanation. To call these sequences “plays” is to risk confusion with the play 1 Henry IV; to call them “plays-within-the-play” is awkward, especially as there are two of them; to call them “playlets” or “mini-plays” seems to me too undignified for something, finally, of profound significance. The term “interlude,” which I choose, sometimes refers specifically to some short plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that can be seen to represent a step in the evolution of the English drama from older morality plays to early Elizabethan realistic comedies. However, “The term has always been ambiguous and generally has been used as a catchall or generic term for a great variety of secular and nonsecular, short and long, comic and serious plays.” (S[uzanne]. R. W[estfall]., “Interlude,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 613.) Another standard reference book points out that the term “interlude” was sometimes used for “a play brief enough to be presented in the interval of a dramatic performance, entertainment, or feast … or it may mean a play or dialogue between two persons.” (A Handbook to Literature, ed. C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon, 6th ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1992], 250.) The sequences in 1 Henry IV are dialogues between two persons, and they may well interrupt the company's feast. Moreover, lude (<ludus) is part of “interlude,” and I take it that the word is ambiguous, meaning “within the play” or “the play within,” both of which fit these two interludes. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, finally, both Quince (1.2.5) and Snout (as Wall, 5.1.154) call Pyramus and Thisbe an interlude. The nature and function of Pyramus in the comedy is analogous to that of the Falstaff-Hal playings in the history.

50. Grace Tiffany, “Shakespeare's Dionysian Prince: Drama, Politics, and the ‘Athenian’ History Play,” Renaissance Quarterly 52, 2 (Summer 1999): 371.

51. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Cleveland and New York: Meridian, 1963), 207.

52. In “Of the Institution and Education of Children” (I, 25) Montaigne strikes a peculiarly modern note in describing the responsibilities of parents: “[T]he greatest difficultie, and importing all humane knowledge, seemeth to be in this point, where the nurture and institution [i.e., education] of young children is in question.” The Essays of Montaigne, tr. John Florio [1603] (New York: Modern Library, 1933), 110.

53. Cf., for example, “‘For as [women] be hard to be won without trial of great faith, so are they hard to be lost without great cause of fickleness. It is long before the cold water seethe, yet being once hot, it is long before it be cooled, it is long before salt come to his saltness, but being once seasoned, it never loseth his savour.’” John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, in Elizabethan Fiction, ed. Robert Ashley and Edwin M. Moseley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1953), 125.

54. For the first, see E. E. Stoll, “Falstaff” in Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927) and Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943). For the second, see McFarland, Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy, 180-84. Tiffany, in “Shakespeare's Dionysian Prince,” also notes the Socratic parallels but concludes that they are ironic and Falstaff is a sophist. I disagree.

55. Compare Rosalind's report on her meeting with her father while she was disguised as Ganymede: “I met the Duke yesterday and had much question with him. He asked me of what parentage I was. I told him of as good as he. …” (As You Like It, 3.4.33-35). See also the disguised King Henry's defense to Williams, before the fact, of how he would behave if captured at Agincourt: “I myself heard the King say he would not be ransomed” (Henry V, 4.1.188-89). Shakespeare seems to enjoy having characters who pretend not to be themselves make trenchant comments on themselves—all for their own sly enjoyment.

56. Montaigne, The Essayes of Montaigne, 350. Caesar's observation will be found in The Gallic Wars, 6, 18.

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